Italy · Liguria · Genoa
Molassana, Genoa — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Molassana is a quarter of Genoa in the middle Val Bisagno, an independent commune until 1926, when it and eighteen others joined the Grande Genova.
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Where to stay in Molassana
The practical side of choosing where to sleep.
The valley floor is the centre. The lower part of Molassana, once a small borgo called Olmo around a chapel to San Rocco, was a staging post on the road to Piacenza where the rio Geirato joins the Bisagno, and covering the last stretch of the Geirato made the large square the quarter now turns on. Above it the old village survives.
The hill core around the church of Santa Maria Assunta kept its rural look, so the quarter runs as country-looking hamlets next to blocks of public housing, which is what late urbanisation left behind. The hills behind are for walking.
About Molassana
What are the main landmarks in Molassana?
The aqueduct path is the best walk here. The historic Acquedotto storico runs most of its length through Molassana on a Luserna stone track, and from the Geirato valley the paths climb to the Creto pass, to the monte Alpe, to the Prato Casarile and to the ruins of the Castelluzzo. A church anchors the old core.
Santa Maria Assunta stands on the hill above the valley floor, and the chapel of San Rocco down in Olmo, the older of the two, now houses a scout group. One factory shaped the middle of the quarter. The Boero paint works ran here for more than fifty years and moved production to Tortona from 2010, and the site was rebuilt with housing, shops and a supermarket that opened in June 2017, the rest finished by May 2022.
What is the history of Molassana?
The lower borgo was called Olmo. It stood where the rio Geirato runs into the Bisagno, a stopping place on the road to Piacenza gathered round a chapel to San Rocco, and it stayed small until the building of the postwar decades made it the centre of the quarter. Independence ended in 1926.
Molassana and eighteen other communes of the Genoese were taken into Genoa to make the Grande Genova, and it became one of the city's circoscrizioni, since 2005 part of the Municipio IV Valbisagno with Struppa and Staglieno. Public housing arrived before the war. Large blocks went up in via Sertoli in the 1930s for people whose quarters in the Genoese old town, around piazza Ponticello, were being pulled down, and the wagons that carried their goods gave the area the local name Arizona, learned from westerns.
Two of its parts were never its own. Montesignano and Sant'Eusebio, on the left side of the Val Bisagno, were once frazioni of the commune of Bavari, and they came into the Molassana circoscrizione later.
Where is Molassana?
Molassana covers 16.61 square kilometres of the middle Val Bisagno, bordering Montoggio to the northeast, Struppa to the east, Marassi to the south, Staglieno to the southwest and Sant'Olcese to the northwest, with the Geirato valley running down into the Bisagno at its centre.
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Updated September 2026